At this point, it's much better than the alternative. It's too late to not invade Iraq, so the best thing the US can do is manage things until the government is strong.
Just look at Africa -- after Britain and France pulled out, everything went to straight to hell. America is doing th right thing by keeping a firm hand on Iraq. A decade from now, pulling out completely will be viable. Doing so now would create a situation so bad that the rest of the middle east would look like a picnic.
We're not just talking about an open door, we're talking about a house with the door wide open and advertisements on the street saying "Come on in, public laser printer inside!".
Windows Shares are exactly that -- shares. They are being shared out publically. The fact that Microsoft makes it possible to share things by accident is simply a demonstration of how hideously insecure Windows is. This is WAY beyond the simple flaws that Windows is known for -- those kinds of flaws are understandable and have been shared by other OS's (like certain versions of Redhat Linux, and MacOS more recently).
These computing resources were being placed in the public domain. It's like finding a laser printer lying on the sidewalk and printing something on it.
Dubya's reckless defecit spending has made the Canadian dollar strong again. If he gets to screw up the American economy for another fours years, Canadian may finally have a stronger dollar the US again! Mmmm, I can't wait to buy a cheap IPod.
A vote for Dubya is a vote for all non-Americans (unless yer skin ain't white and yer sitting on a lot of oil).
If you let the economy go its own way, you end up with Industrial-revolution Britain, where the working class had a live expectancy of 20 years. Or you end up with open warfare between unionizers and police forces, as America saw at the turn of the century.
Besides, because roads just build themselves, and the police and fire department don't need to be paid. They fund themselves by magic!
The more we get taxed, the more our society fails to suck.
Consider Bill Gates -- he makes billions of dollars a year. Pretend he just makes a single billion a year. Now pretend we tax away all but a million dollars of it. He's not really suffering, since a million dollars is still an enormous sum of money. Yet we now have enough tax money to give jobs to 10000 civil servants (assuming each one requires 100000 in salary, office rent, etc). Frankly, I'll happily make Bill Gates subsist at the millionaire level to create 10000 jobs.
Well, I will, but that's because I'm Canadian. Not that my own government isn't in love with censorship and neoconservatism, as recent events have shown.
Trickle-down economics? Grow up. They don't work, and never have. The whole concept of trickle-down economics was just a feeble excuse to cut taxes for the wealthy.
Denying it would, ironically, give it some credibility (like Microsoft acknowledging Linux as competition). Besides, they probably need some time to look into it.
I think Nader's heart is in the right place, but he's starting too big. It's too soon to break the two-party system at the presidential level.
America's left leaning voters need to start by putting a few more members of the green party into congress, and into their state municipal governments. Once there's more of a tradition of voting outside the big two, voting for someone like Nader wont just be a wasted vote. It sucks, but that's the reality.
What does fair or egalitarian have to do with it? Non-proliferation nations CHOSE to be that way. Like Canada -- we have tons of weapons grade plutonium (our nuclear reactors use it as fuel), and the technical know-how to build ICBMs (Canadian scientists participated in the manhattan project and many subsequent nuclear tests). But Canada voluntarily signed the nonproliferation treaty.
Fairness has nothing to do with it. It's about standing by your principles, and choosing to not build nuclear weapons.
I didn't realize that you were "most people". You think just because YOU haven't been affected by Microsoft vulnerabilities, that most other Windows users haven't been as well? That's an invalid generalization if there ever was one.
Slashdot is anti-microsoft for a reason -- Microsoft software is technologically inferior. It has way too many severe vulnerabilities. Without a firewall, a fresh Windows 2000 installation will have a worm within a minute of connecting to the internet. And that's without ever opening a single application. No other operating system EVER MADE can compare to that.
No matter what fantasy world you live in, you cannot argue that Windows is not horrifically insecure.
Buildings ARE designed to withstand airplane crashes. It works too, as was demonstrated when the Empire State Building survived having an American B-25 Bomber crash into it in 1945.
You seem to be confusing the way things should be with the way things are. Private individuals and groups routinely initiate offensive force without government sanction and evade punishment or retribution of any kind. It happens less here than in places like Africa or South America, but it still happens.
Power is not the right to initiate force -- it is the ability to initiate force successfully. And many private groups possess that ability. There are numerous cases of businesses utilizing their security forces when it wasn't necessary. Many people have been killed by security guards when they weren't actually posing any kind of threat to anyone, but merely seemed suspicious. People have gotten away with murder simply by having better lawyers than the state. If that's not power, I don't know what is.
The government is simply a group that the PEOPLE have sanctioned to hold more power than anyone else. After all, that is the principle behind representative democracy. The PEOPLE bitch-slapped Britain out the door by initiating enormous amounts of force offensively. No government sanctioned that (unless you count France's government;) ). The government was then sactioned to hold a certain amount of power, ostensibly more than any private group could.
Algorithmically speaking, servers are abominations since they loop and never terminate. They are the very antithesis of the functional and imperative paradigms. That's why the imperative paradigm is so successfull -- it matches up more closely to what programmers really need to do.
Haskell and Prolog and stuff are nice for mathematical problem solving and AI, but even only as a subsystem of a larger C++ or Java application.
Try causing a scene in a bar, and get a taste of a private group's ability to initiate force.
Or try walking into an office building without a passcard -- they'll send some nice gentleman out to iniate force and physically remove you.
Or try to set up a union in South America -- watch how quickly lethal force is initiated against you. Substantial amounts of force were initiated by private groups against union organizers in North America back at the beginning of the 19th century. Unions in tern initiated force against businesses (a lot of people turned up missing, if you'll recall). In fact, isn't a labour strike a form of force? CUPE, a union here in Canada, is capable of completely shutting down the entire economy nationwide because of their control over all public services.
The government simply has more force than private groups do -- which makes sense because otherwise anyone could set themselves up as a warlord, which is exactly what happens in crappy countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and most African nations.
I was able to use reisersfsck to repair a partition resize that had gone wrong. I was pretty impressed -- only three files lost out of 20,000 (and fortunately they weren't important files!)
This just hastens the end of the patent system. Seriously -- the American patent system is going to fall apart soon, and things like this are the reason.
The underlying premise of patents will no doubt survive, as it makes a lot of sense in some areas (like engineering). But software and business process patents will probably disappear.
Obviously, some caution is required. But it would also be a shame to see this technology be slowed down. What we really need is some kind of consortium that will let companies work together to come up with reasonable standards that wont hinder their work. Legislation should be avoided until it proves necessary.
I won't disagree with you there. I love Eclipse, IBM's wonderful donation to the world of Free IDE's.
I'll start being impressed when IBM releases their patented algorithms under some sort of GPL-for -patents.
It's ironic that IBM would even MENTION open standards and freedom, given their track record. They hold thousands of patents, and don't think twice about using them to crush competition. The only reason that we don't have high-quality arithmetic compression tools is that IBM has been holding a patent on a necessary algorithm for years. Also, IBM are active members of the TCPA.
Don't be fooled by their recent Linux-friendly stance. IBM are no different than Microsoft, HP, or any other big company,
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at Africa -- after Britain and France pulled out, everything went to straight to hell. America is doing th right thing by keeping a firm hand on Iraq. A decade from now, pulling out completely will be viable. Doing so now would create a situation so bad that the rest of the middle east would look like a picnic.
We're not just talking about an open door, we're talking about a house with the door wide open and advertisements on the street saying "Come on in, public laser printer inside!". Windows Shares are exactly that -- shares. They are being shared out publically. The fact that Microsoft makes it possible to share things by accident is simply a demonstration of how hideously insecure Windows is. This is WAY beyond the simple flaws that Windows is known for -- those kinds of flaws are understandable and have been shared by other OS's (like certain versions of Redhat Linux, and MacOS more recently).
These computing resources were being placed in the public domain. It's like finding a laser printer lying on the sidewalk and printing something on it.
That is a truely awesome sig.
Dubya's reckless defecit spending has made the Canadian dollar strong again. If he gets to screw up the American economy for another fours years, Canadian may finally have a stronger dollar the US again! Mmmm, I can't wait to buy a cheap IPod. A vote for Dubya is a vote for all non-Americans (unless yer skin ain't white and yer sitting on a lot of oil).
Besides, because roads just build themselves, and the police and fire department don't need to be paid. They fund themselves by magic!
The more we get taxed, the more our society fails to suck.
Consider Bill Gates -- he makes billions of dollars a year. Pretend he just makes a single billion a year. Now pretend we tax away all but a million dollars of it. He's not really suffering, since a million dollars is still an enormous sum of money. Yet we now have enough tax money to give jobs to 10000 civil servants (assuming each one requires 100000 in salary, office rent, etc). Frankly, I'll happily make Bill Gates subsist at the millionaire level to create 10000 jobs.
Well, I will, but that's because I'm Canadian. Not that my own government isn't in love with censorship and neoconservatism, as recent events have shown.
Trickle-down economics? Grow up. They don't work, and never have. The whole concept of trickle-down economics was just a feeble excuse to cut taxes for the wealthy.
Denying it would, ironically, give it some credibility (like Microsoft acknowledging Linux as competition). Besides, they probably need some time to look into it.
There's a lot of motivation right now, both to discredit Bush and to make him look alright. I wouldn't be surprised if this is fake.
America's left leaning voters need to start by putting a few more members of the green party into congress, and into their state municipal governments. Once there's more of a tradition of voting outside the big two, voting for someone like Nader wont just be a wasted vote. It sucks, but that's the reality.
Because their taxes pay our welfare cheques! Hooray!
Fairness has nothing to do with it. It's about standing by your principles, and choosing to not build nuclear weapons.
Slashdot is anti-microsoft for a reason -- Microsoft software is technologically inferior. It has way too many severe vulnerabilities. Without a firewall, a fresh Windows 2000 installation will have a worm within a minute of connecting to the internet. And that's without ever opening a single application. No other operating system EVER MADE can compare to that.
No matter what fantasy world you live in, you cannot argue that Windows is not horrifically insecure.
It's only a big deal with Microsoft because the vulnerabilities in Microsoft software are typically quite severe and affect almost everyone.
Buildings ARE designed to withstand airplane crashes. It works too, as was demonstrated when the Empire State Building survived having an American B-25 Bomber crash into it in 1945.
Heh. I probably shouldn't have kept arguing -- it's obvious we're essentially on the same page, and are only disputing some definitions.
Power is not the right to initiate force -- it is the ability to initiate force successfully. And many private groups possess that ability. There are numerous cases of businesses utilizing their security forces when it wasn't necessary. Many people have been killed by security guards when they weren't actually posing any kind of threat to anyone, but merely seemed suspicious. People have gotten away with murder simply by having better lawyers than the state. If that's not power, I don't know what is.
The government is simply a group that the PEOPLE have sanctioned to hold more power than anyone else. After all, that is the principle behind representative democracy. The PEOPLE bitch-slapped Britain out the door by initiating enormous amounts of force offensively. No government sanctioned that (unless you count France's government ;) ). The government was then sactioned to hold a certain amount of power, ostensibly more than any private group could.
Haskell and Prolog and stuff are nice for mathematical problem solving and AI, but even only as a subsystem of a larger C++ or Java application.
Or try walking into an office building without a passcard -- they'll send some nice gentleman out to iniate force and physically remove you.
Or try to set up a union in South America -- watch how quickly lethal force is initiated against you. Substantial amounts of force were initiated by private groups against union organizers in North America back at the beginning of the 19th century. Unions in tern initiated force against businesses (a lot of people turned up missing, if you'll recall). In fact, isn't a labour strike a form of force? CUPE, a union here in Canada, is capable of completely shutting down the entire economy nationwide because of their control over all public services.
The government simply has more force than private groups do -- which makes sense because otherwise anyone could set themselves up as a warlord, which is exactly what happens in crappy countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and most African nations.
I was able to use reisersfsck to repair a partition resize that had gone wrong. I was pretty impressed -- only three files lost out of 20,000 (and fortunately they weren't important files!)
So I'd say it works pretty well.
The underlying premise of patents will no doubt survive, as it makes a lot of sense in some areas (like engineering). But software and business process patents will probably disappear.
Obviously, some caution is required. But it would also be a shame to see this technology be slowed down. What we really need is some kind of consortium that will let companies work together to come up with reasonable standards that wont hinder their work. Legislation should be avoided until it proves necessary.
I won't disagree with you there. I love Eclipse, IBM's wonderful donation to the world of Free IDE's. I'll start being impressed when IBM releases their patented algorithms under some sort of GPL-for -patents.
Don't be fooled by their recent Linux-friendly stance. IBM are no different than Microsoft, HP, or any other big company,